Disciplines

Publication Details

Presented at the 15th Annual Conference of the Health Informatics Society of Ireland, Stillorgan Dublin.

Abstract

In 1991 the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) introduced the first version of a standard called ASTM E1394-91 for communication between centralised clinical analysers and host systems. For nearly 20 years this low key standard has been used as the basis for analyser host communications. A minor revision of the standard (ASTM1394-97) was published in 1998. This work gives a brief summary of the development of lab messages that led to the introduction and continued use of the standard. The authors also present a review and preliminary analysis of 30 implementations of ASTM E1394. The authors investigated 30 relevant analyser interfaces in order to identify the successfuland unsuccessful features of the ASTM E1394-97 standard by assessing the compliance and non-compliance of the chosen implementations with respect to different features of the standard.